On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 07:41:46PM -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >... > From: Richard Monson-Haefel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 01:30:33 -0500 >... > There. That is honest feedback on a public list. I debated doing this. The > fact that I debated speaking my mind at all, convinced me that private > voting in the PMC is a must. You want honesty in a public forum, then people > are going to be hurt -- or at least offended. I'm sorry, Aaron if this has > offended or embarrassed you in any way. I felt compelled to be honest. > Apparently David Blevins and others feel you deserve commit access ... I > respect there opinions and won't object.
Exactly. And even if the person is *not* offended (as Aaron stated), there is *still* that tiny bit of doubt in the back of the votee's mind. A small shift in the shading of how future posts are viewed. A new set of glasses to read future posts. Simply look at Aaron's response and his questioning of the commentary that Richard made. While Aaron wasn't "offended", he *is* thinking that Richard's post wasn't entirely fair. For the most part, we are all very nice people. You have to be in the open source world because you (generally) have to work with people. And part of being nice is being *considerate*. To that end, it is very hard to post your innermost thoughts in a public forum, and especially where the person can read them. Adding a committer is giving somebody the right to modify ASF property. That should not be a light decision. That means that candor is required, and that can be done most effectively in a private environment. Jason raises a good point, however: how does the Incubator PMC debate the merits of the various candidate committers? Are they familiar enough with the details? And this isn't even the half of it -- the PMC members paying attention to this list are a pretty strong subset of the entire PMC. So what is the resolution? Hard to say :-) *That* discussion is an interesting one. There are two opposing items here: 1) need for information to make a qualified judgement of committer status 2) need for the PMC to be the responsible party for that decision This really only applies during Incubation, where the PMC members are not the incubated project's active committers. One answer might be to constitute the Geronimo PMC early, and get some of the right people into that PMC (e.g. geronimo committers + some incubator PMC members). That has a lot of ramifications, though, in terms of the overall ASF oversight that has been described elsewhere -- that PMC (and thus, the "new" geronimo committers) would need to start answering directly to the Board rather than getting its feet wet via the Incubator PMC. And the Board still needs the Incubator PMC to be involved, so there is potential for confusing lines of responsibility... Yes, the incubation process is "relatively" new if you haven't guessed :-) There are certain requirements from the ASF side of things, but those are not always clear, and the way to effect those are unknown in many areas. As each project goes through incubation, we have learned more and more. Just don't ask Andy Oliver about incubation: he was the first one, and thus had *THE* most difficult time of anyone. Ever. He doesn't have good words about the process :-) Cheers, -g -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
